About five years ago, a bizarre idea occurred to me. At the time, I was designing complex electronic circuits to mimic a small portion of an insect brain. These circuits would be created on a tiny ...

When it comes to teamwork, we could all learn something from ants. These relatively simple, small-brained animals are famous ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Tiny robots inspired by insects could soon glide across water, scouting flooded areas, monitoring pollutants, or collecting ...

Science frequently draws inspiration from the natural world. After all, nature has had billions of years to perfect its systems and processes. Taking their cue from mollusk catch muscles, researchers ...

New insect-scale microrobots can fly more than 100 times longer than previous versions. The new bots, also significantly faster and more agile, could someday be used to pollinate fruits and vegetables ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. DENVER (KDVR) — A University of Colorado ...

An organic synapse array enables night vision and pattern recognition in insect robots by detecting near-infrared light and triggering real-time motor responses. (Nanowerk Spotlight) Insect-scale ...

Rapid declines in insect populations are leading to concerns that the pollination of important crops could soon come under threat. Tiny flying robots designed by MIT researchers could one day provide ...

Kaushik Jayaram envisions a day when swarms of tiny robots, some weighing no more than a paperclip, will crawl through airplanes or into buildings after an earthquake—searching for survivors or ...

Shape-morphing, insect-scale robots that feature an origami-inspired design and eight independently actuated degrees of freedom, powered by custom piezoelectric actuators for enhanced mechanical ...